SilliMarilli

You kind of lose track of the days.

“Oi!” had cried Mistress Pansy, halting so suddenly you nearly bumped into the hobbit. She peered up at you from beneath the brim of her straw hat. “Do you mean to tell me you have that vagabond Stick at Naught Strider hid up in Mistress Thistlewool’s cot?”

‘Strider,’ huh? Well, at least now you know tall, dark, and incoherent’s name.

“That’s no concern of mine,” comes Barliman Butterbur’s voice from down the hall as clear as a bell. “Aye your money is as good as any other man’s, but I have no need of the trouble that comes with it.”

The answer is a low rumble you can’t quite discern.

Nob’s home with a fever, or he would be the one spending the day pouring out the pisspots into the barrel for the honey wagon, sweeping out the hearths in the empty rooms, making up the beds in the occupied ones, and the million and one other small things that need to happen to keep the inn running, but when Bob appeared at your door before the crack of dawn you leaped at the chance. Barliman paid in coin.

“No, it don’t matter should you keep to your room,” comes his voice, closer this time. “I’ll not have you and your lot here. Not after what happened the last time!”

What the hell happened “last time?”

No. No, you don’t want to know.

You’d give Barliman his privacy, but you can hear his voice all the way down the hall and through the closed door. Not that his whisper couldn’t travel that far. The man has a voice like a foghorn from all that shouting over his customers in the common room. Wasn’t much that was secret here at The Prancing Pony.

“Now Bill Ferny is a regular of mine and you’ve no call to speak ill of him like that. Off with you now, or I’ll call Harry from the gate and have you dragged out and thrown onto the Road should you force me to it.”